This is all very ridiculous shaped.

I'm prepared to accept that 4e is a fun game to play, but its most rabid fanbois don't make it easy to love. Take a look at this thread, which explains the new jargon categorising character classes as 'A' shaped, 'V' shaped, 'Y' shaped and 'MAD'. Am I the only one who pictures the comic shop owner from The Simpsons explaining all this? "No, you pathetic moron, 'V' shaped means the class has one attack stat and two secondary stats, and 'Y' shaped means it has two choices for attack stat and one as secondary! And you call yourself a D&D player?"

Lord help us. Does anybody remember a time when you just picked a character class because it's what you happened to fancy playing this time around? I wonder when it all became so very serious - like it really matters that you pick the optimum character to fit into the optimum group. As if that sort of thing has any impact at all on how fun the game is.

Yapefulu the Skinner

The jungles of Yoon-Suin are haunted. Ghosts lurk in their darkest places. Some of them are the spirits of travellers and explorers lost in the forest. Others are entities of a more ancient and unearthly heritage. One of these is the being called Yapefulu the Skinner. He makes his home in the jungle canopy and comes down to the forest floor at night, searching for human prey. Those he captures he skins alive; their cries of pain echo through the jungle night. The skins are then hung in the high branches of the forest. Nobody knows what Yapefulu does with the flesh and bones.

Those who have seen Yapefulu describe a creature like an ape, yet thin and wasted, featureless and black like shadow. His eyes are like tiny stars shining in the blackness.

Yapefulu the Skinner

Armour Class: 1
Hit Dice: 9**
Move: 150' (50')
Climbing: 120' (40')
Attacks: 2 claw
Damage: 1d10/1d10
No. Appearing: 1
Save As: F9
Morale: 11
Treasure Type: Nil
Intelligence: 10
Alignment: Chaotic
XP: 2300

Special Abilities: Immunity to Normal Weapons, Paralysis.

If Yapefulu manages to paralyse a victim he will attempt to grab that person and climb up into the trees. He has an effective STR score of 18. Once the victim has been carried up into the canopy (usually 120') he is lost. Companions can attempt to free the victim from Yapefulu's grasp with an opposed STR test.

The Beasts from the Holes of Làhàg

Làhàg is famous for its pits - huge holes, up to a mile across and two hundred yards deep, which plunge down into the forest floor. Their floors are carpeted with jungle vegetation, and their walls are lined with caves which, it is said, link together under the surface of the earth in a vast labyrinthine network.

Strange beings - unable or unwilling to climb to the surface - lurk in the holes and in the caves which link them. They are nameless entities without discernable language or culture. They create nothing and have no apparent emotion. They exist only to eat, which they do with reckless abandon - anything living which comes into the holes is attacked and devoured unless it is strong or fast enough to escape.

The sage ¡Yi Klu of the Explorer's Cult did much work to study the beasts - until they brought about his end. His journal was taken back to the Cult's library by his assistants, where it is still very occasionally read. He describes the beasts as "somewhat like a fanged frog, somewhat like an octopus, and somewhat like a man, though with a cruel and uncaring nature all of their own."

The Beasts from the Holes of Làhàg

Armour Class: 5
Hit Dice: 2+2
Move: 150' (50')
Attacks: 1 bite, 2 tentacle
Damage: 1d6/1d4/1d4
No. Appearing: 2d6 (2d12 in lair)
Save As: F1
Morale: 9
Treasure Type: Nil
Intelligence: 7
Alignment: Chaotic
XP Value: 25

Chigasaki, 2028 AD

[I lived in Chigasaki for almost four years, between early 2003 and late 2006. Of all the places around the world I've been for any length of time, Chigasaki is my favourite after my home city of Liverpool. I've often thought about setting a campaign there. Currently I have an idea for a Cyberpunk 2020 game set in the city, taking place in the broader context of my Japan, 2028 AD campaign setting.]


Chigasaki City

Population (2020 census): 216,378
Ethnic Composition (unofficial*): 91.9% Japanese, 4.2% Korean, 1.8% Philippino, 0.8% Chinese, 0.6% Other Asian, 0.4% South American, 0.2% Black African, 0.1% White European
Major Industries: Manufacturing (machine parts, pharmaceuticals, military hardware, nanotechnology, biotechnology), tourism, fishing
Mayor: Shimoyamada Yonosuke (New Komeito)
Notable Sites: Samukawa Jinja (the most important shinto shrine in the region) is situated to the north in Samukawa town; the Southern Beach is, along with Kugenuma-kaigan, famous as the birthplace of surfing in Japan.

Description

Chigasaki was a seaside resort town from the time of the Shogunate; in fact the Tokugawa family long maintained summer residences in the area, taking advantage of the warm waters of Sagami Bay and glorious views of Mount Fuji.

After the Second World War, particular after the 1960s, Chigasaki began to achieve fame for surfing, and is widely known as the place where the sport first became popular in Japan. It gained a reputation as a playground for young Tokyo-ites and a desirable residence for the nation's burgeoning nouveau-riche.

During the Daikonran Chigasaki escaped severe damage, although it was the scene of several riots between supporters of the New Komeito party and various fascist and communist groups. After the onset of the war in 2020 the city underwent further industrialisation (which had hitherto been light), concentrating on producing machine parts for military vehicles, and high-tech components for biological and nanotech weapons.

Shin-Keiretsu

Both the Hitotsuyanagi and Hoshino conglomerates have a strong presence in Chigasaki, making it a front line in the corporate cold war between the two groups. Kimura Seimei, one of Hitotsuyanagi's flagship companies, has its Kanto headquarters in the north of the city; other Hitotsuyanagi group corporations with plants there include the biotech research company Murada Bio and the rocket manufacturer NRC. Hoshino group companies in the city specialise in pharmaceuticals and machine parts.

The war between Hitotsuyanagi and Hoshino occasionally turns hot, as when a car bomb near Kita-Chigasaki Station killed three civilians and an executive officer for Kimura Seimei in December 2027.

Immigrant Groups

Kanagawa prefecture has had large, longstanding Korean and Chinese populations, both with histories stretching back to before the Second World War. The city has also relied on immigrants from the Philippines, Indonesia and South America to support its industry since the 1990s. Post 2016 and the institution of the new regime saw increased immigration also from Africa and Eastern Europe.

Organised Crime

Organised crime groups in the city include the yakuza clans Kawabata-gumi, Tsurugaoka-kai and Ota-kai. As is traditional, the membership of these clans is international in character, with up to 50% of the membership being of Korean-Japanese, Chinese-Japanese or Philippino-Japanese origin - obviously as a result of the limited economic opportunities offered these groups. Chinese Triad gangs also have a presence in the city, notably the 14k group; there is a constant low-level war between it and the yakuza clans.

Economic activities carried out by these groups include prostitution, pachinko, pornography and tobacco and firearms smuggling - primarily from the Occupied Regions. Drug-running remains a lesser concern.

Other Issues

Chigasaki is a centre for illegal whaling and fishing for endangered species of shellfish. This is a longstanding issue which various city governments have attempted to resolve, sometimes through force and other times through incentivising; none have been successful. It is a widely acknowledged truth that police corruption is mostly responsible for the failures.

Chigasaki is also a staging point for ferries to the Izu-Shoto Autonomous Economic Region, since the creation of a new harbour in 2019. Ferries are available for employees in AER-based companies only, and security in the area is strictly enforced. Human rights abuses, including summary beatings and imprisonment without trial of 'trespassers', are frequently attributed to corporate security around the harbour area.

*The Japanese government does not collate data on ethnic composition in its census.

S. John Ross Speaks Words of Wisdom

Best quote ever by S. John Ross over at Jeff's Gameblog (towards the bottom of the comments):

I do have a strong pro-scenario, pro-honest-tactics, pro-let-the-dice-fall, anti-story, plot-is-just-for-structure-make-it-about-the-PCs-and-their-choices-not-your-whiny-ass-narrative-go-write-a-novel-if-you're-so-into-yourself agenda.

To which I can only say, amen! And that I would like to make this a motto.

It ties neatly into a comment I made over at Compromise & Conceit. (I'm not stalking the poor fellow, honest - he got grist for his blog mill from some posts I made about Tolkien, so this is my way of returning the favour). Mr. faustusnotes had written:

It’s really hard to interfere with PCs actions coherently [in a Cyberpunk game], because in any sci-fi future the power of the state is so overwhelming that the one consistent thing criminal PCs can expect is that they will die horribly and probably before they even know what happened; but there’s no reward in doing this, so you have to contort your story to enable them to escape and still be challenged.

To which I thought: I beg your pardon? And replied:

I have to ask: why on earth would you not have criminal PCs die horribly if they transgress the law in an obvious way? Punishing idiotic behaviour is precisely the sort of thing that will force the players to learn how to achieve their goals in cleverer and more subtle ways. And that will result in a much better game for all concerned – which is the “reward”. Letting players off the hook is the worst thing you can do; it encourages the bad behaviour.

It helps if you think of the players like pigeons in a Skinner box, I find.

The reason problems like the one Mr. faustusnotes describes arise in people's games is, of course, that dirtiest of all dirty words - story. Namely the GM's story. Story implies a beginning, a middle and an end, and this results in 'contortions' (fudging dice rolls, making enemies suddenly incompetent, letting players get away from what should be certain death) when the story begins to go off the rails.

To which the proper reaction should be: fuck it. The player makes the choices and the GM goes with it, and if this means horrible death then so be it. Those are the terms on which player buy-in occurs (that their actions mean something and have consequences) and that's the way the GM should deal with the game.

The flipside of that particular coin, of course, is that players owe it to the GM not to throw their toys out of the pram when things go (justly) awry. If the GM's responsibility is to give player choice meaning, then the player's responsibility is not to piss and whine when that doesn't go their way.

Nihilism and Robin Hood in 2020 AD

Mr. faustusnotes, regular hand-wringing cry-me-a-river liberal commenter on my entries (just kidding) in my last entry made the comment that Cyberpunk 2020 encourages nihilism and criminal behaviour. I challenged this, pointing out that most RPGs seem to take this sort of behaviour as standard. He then followed up with the contention:

I don't think most PCs [in most games] are nihilists and criminals. Most PCs cooperate with a group of people to save the world from evil. The fantasy genre context for nihilism is completely different to the cyberpunk context.

Thinking about this, I realised that nihilistic criminals tended to be type of characters my group and I always made up for our CP 2020 campaigns, because we were teenage boys, but the game itself can be played in a moral way - and that this is very consistent with the genre.

Bruce Sterling's introductory essay to William Gibson's short-story collection Burning Chrome is a vital read for anybody who wants to understand cyberpunk as a genre. (In fact Burning Chrome, far more so than Neuromancer, is I think Gibson's true masterpiece. None of the stories dip in quality below excellent; all of them paint a compelling vision of the future.) As I've written several times, the key point that Sterling makes is that Gibson's stories - in contrast to sci-fi's general obsession with the square-jawed two-fisted heroic technocratic Ralph 124C 41+ type - concern themselves with the underbelly of society, the Victims of the New. His characters are those who have been crushed, eaten, chewed up, swallowed, and then spat out again by a society which has no place for them and does not care. This in my opinion is an almost Dickensian mode of fiction writing and highly moral: it says "These are the victims of this bleak future, here is their story, and here is how they win (or lose with defiance)."

CP 2020 can be all about that too. Ideas for Robin Hood style campaigns, off the top of my head:

• A group of 'nomads' (Roma/Sinti or Travellers in Europe, Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, tribal communities in Asia) are turfed off their land by the government or a corporation - how do they fight back?
• The PCs are crusading investigative reporters uncovering dastardly exploitation of land or labour/war crimes/criminal activity/political corruption
• The PCs are an ambulance crew/vice squad in the roughest part of a major city, trying to do some little good
• The PCs are a group of vigilantes attempting to restore order in their neighbourhood in the face of police apathy
  

There are plenty more options for games which focus on stemming the tide of nihilism, rather than require nihilistic behaviour from the PCs.

"It's not like I'm using, it's like my body's developed this massive drug deficiency."

So Sir Larkins has asked me to elaborate on why I commented in the past that Cyberpunk 2020 was "broken" as a game. I should clarify by saying that I love the game and have played it a lot, probably as much as D&D, and that there is a perfectly okay system lurking in there somewhere - if you're willing to house rule. A lot.

So what are the problems? Cyberpunk 2020's design flaws: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

1) The core mechanic (d10+skill+stat, beat the difficulty score) has a key problem, namely that failure is too frequent - whenever you roll a '1'. A 10% rate of failure, no matter how skilled the actor or how hard the task, is just too high to be credible.

2) The d10+skill+stat mechanic has that "Eh?"-inducing element which all systems using that mechanic have. I call it the Stupid Biology Professor problem: A biology professor with average intelligence (5) but a PhD in biology (+9) has the same chance of success in a biology related task as a brilliant person (intelligence 10) with only an A in biology at 'A' level (+4). That doesn't make sense.

3) Each role has a special skill, available only to them, which supposedly reflects their unique character. Except that most of these are poorly defined and far too broad in nature to be be associated with one role. The worst culprit was the Solo's special ability - Combat Awareness - which gives bonuses to initiative. Supposedly, it reflects the Solo's nature as a hitman/corporate assassin/mercenary. But if you think about it for even a second, it just doesn't make sense that a rookie Solo who's never even been in a firefight should be faster (way faster, potentially) and more combat-aware than a Cop who's seen 15 years on the street and been in countless gun battles with hardened criminals - simply by virtue of the fact that the Solo has a different role and thus possesses 'Combat Awareness'. This problem is common to essentially all the roles.

4) Characters start off with different amounts of cash depending on what role they have and how many points they've invested in their role-specific special skill. Works well for Solos and Techies, who have valuable special skills: not only does putting lots of points into that skill pay off in-game, it also means they start off with lots of cash. Not so great for Medias, whose special skill is basically a dump stat, or Fixers, whose special skill is amorphous, vague, and superseded by what happens in-game. Those characters have to trade off being a competent pauper or a rich specialist in a crap ability.

5) Netrunning is by turns incredibly dull, complicated, time-consuming and laughable in its vision of the internet. The last problem isn't the designers' fault, because how could they know? But the rest conspire to make what should have been an essential element really annoying.

6) Armour is too important. Even relatively light kevlar can stop most decent rounds. This is made worse by the cheap and readily available cyber implants which armour the skin. Combine the two and you have starting characters who are practically invulnerable to anything smaller than a FN-FAL and who you need a railgun to take down with one shot. But this of course applies to NPCs too - which then results in the need for the PCs to go everywhere with 7.62mm calibre assault rifles or bigger.

7) The Reflex characteristic was just far too important, as it governed everything from combat to driving to athletics to stealth. It was the very embodiment of the concept of the god-stat.

All of that said, however, Cyberpunk 2020 is still a lot of fun. Combat is exciting and lethal, the rules are very easy to grasp, character generation (if you're into random chargen) comes up with hilarious results. Moreover it gets that tone just right: the writing perfectly captured the mood of what cyberpunk is all about as a genre - those wonderfully 80s concerns about accelerating technological development, societal breakdown, the spread of Communism, and the rise of Japan. And yet it also captured the Punk part very well too - it manifestly concerned itself with Sterling's "Victims of the New" and what their role in the future would be. This is a perennial concern, something which speaks to the human condition, if you will, and ripe for exploration in gaming. (I've written about this before, somewhere - ah yes, here.)

If I was going to run Cyberpunk 2020 again (and I'd like to) it would be with the old house rules we used to use:

• Netrunner is an NPC role
  
• Anybody can pick any special skill, at double the IP cost
• Starting cash is a flat rate for each role
• Automatic failure on a roll of '1' can be re-rolled if you have +5 in the skill or more

Plus some extra ones I've been toying with while thinking over this entry:

• There are no roles, just skills and abilities
• 'Reflexes' gets split into Agility and Reflexes

More generally, some of the problems (especially those to do with the importance of armour and toting around massive guns) can be solved by the GM being realistic about what the police and society expects. No, it is not possible to walk around in broad daylight wearing a flak helmet without the police wondering what you're up to. No, you can't walk into a club cradling an uzi without the bouncers wanting to stop you. Yes, you will be minigunned down by SWAT team gyrocopters if you start a firefight in broad daylight. I don't think the rulebook stressed the importance of this sort of thing nearly enough, and consequently though our games were always a lot of fun for the 14-year-old male (full-body conversion cyborgs with smartchipped assault carbines chewing up entire shopping precints) I don't think they'd hold my attention for longer than about 10 minutes now. Well, okay, perhaps half an hour...

In the Halls of Mandos

My favourite roguelike game, T.O.M.E. has a "Lost Soul" mode, in which you start off as a dead soul, freshly arrived in the Halls of Mandos. Armed only with some starting adventurer's gear, the goal is to make your way back to the real world so you can live your life again. Except that the monsters inhabiting the Halls are the kind who ordinary adventurers will only be facing once they've reached level 50 - and you're right at the bottom of about a hundred dungeon levels.

The D&D equivalent would be trying to survive as a 1st level wizard in a dungeon filled with ancient red dragons, balors, pit fiends and a few tarrasques for good measure. You die time and time again - dozens upon dozens of characters consigned forever to oblivion. But every so often you manage to get a kill, of some lowly denizen, which nevertheless gives you enough XP to gain sometimes five levels at a time. And these little rewards keep you interested. Until you turn the next corner and that character gets splatted and you have to start all over again.

I want to make a campaign based on this.

Oh virgins, listen all virgins are liars honey

I've been thinking about playstyles today. Not that GNS nonsense. The old fashioned personality clashes that go on in a group of role players sometimes.

I suppose, generally speaking, I tend towards a certain level of intra-party conflict (as in, party disagreements, insults and bickering) in my gaming. I put this down to three things:

1. Reality, by which I mean the truism that people flung together by circumstance (as PCs in a campaign often are) aren't going to get on like a house on fire without some work and common bonding experiences which bring them together. This serves to make party unity and comraderie, when it eventually happens, all the more rewarding; the team is a team because over a period of facing common challenges they have come to trust and rely on each other. A priori unity, where everybody is friends from day dot, seems forced by comparison - unless of course there's a backstory explanation for it.

2. I've done most of my gaming - in fact almost all of my gaming - with other men. (Some men in that position worry about this; I've seen threads on rpg.net expressing anxiety about the number of women in the hobby. For those of us who can meet women in our daily lives, it's less of a problem.) Now, I hate to generalise like this without a license, but it's also a truism that when a group of male friends get together the primary mode of interaction is the insult - the cruder the better. This naturally bleeds into character interactions within the game, in my experience, and though it adds a little spice and a little edge to proceedings, it's also always carried out on a shared understanding that the bickering and insults are tongue-in-cheek and not to be taken at all seriously. This is the kind of atmosphere that I, and I suspect most male gamers, are used to.

3. Some of the absolute best gaming experiences I've ever been party to revolved around some big in-character arguments which practically elevated themselves to theatre. The time when half the party secretly struck up a bargain with a dragon that had killed various friends and family members of the other half, who then found out. The time when the amoral thief character cheerfully offered up another character's pets to be eaten by a group of grell in exchange for safe passage. The time when one character shot a vital witness and took the entire campaign onto an entirely new trajectory - from investigation to fleeing the law. The time we spent the entire night arguing about whether to kill our captive worst enemy in cold blood or let him go. These episodes all stick in my mind far more than any in-game triumph - perhaps because those sort of moments get the closest (in my experience) to the oft-sought after but rarely-found genuine immersion.

Is this a rare point of view? Obviously it's impossible to know what "other gamers do", but I'm intrigued about how cooperative or not groups of PCs tend to be in other people's games. I should add the caveat that I'm not talking about PCs fighting each other, which I've always avoided, but a healthy level of trading insults and general banter.

Warhammer FRP 2nd Edition: What D&D 3.x Should Have Been

I'm enjoying running my Warhammer FRP PBEM game. Proceedings have been amusingly chaotic and the party members have an interesting tendency to attack everything on sight, which should prove entertaining in the long term.

I'm also enjoying the system, which is rare for me - generally speaking my philosophy on system is "Who gives a shit so long as you have motivated players and good characters, and we're not playing Blue Rose?" But WFRP really scratches that itch I have for realistic, gritty, low-fantasy nastiness, plus mutants, chaos gods and unreliable firearms.

The best thing about WFRP is the combat, which is both tactically fun but also pretty authentic in feel - the characters seem fragile in the same way that real people are fragile, and armour and shields are often the difference between life and death. It's a far cry from the weird D&D world of hit points, armour class and abstract mechanics - which is part of the charm, of course, but just not a proper fit for so many styles of gaming.

What interests me most about WFRP is that the combat is at least broadly similar to D&D 3.x's - everything is based on full and half actions, swift actions, free actions, etc. - but the difference is that WFRP's system just works, whereas I never felt D&D 3.x's did. Attacks of Opportunity were always annoying and fiddly; grappling and unarmed combat generally was a mess. Worse, the obsession with the tactical minutiae of combat never sat right with the level of abstraction at which the traditional mechanics existed - combat itself was exceptionally detailed tactically, but at the point at which hits and damage (the meat and bones) came into play, it suddenly morphed into something very simplistic. By contrast, WFRP combat is always at the same level of abstraction and the same level of detail, whether you're working out what actions exactly your character can do this round, or working out where he's been hurt and how badly. More importantly, its combat isn't likely to be ruined by overly powerful magic-users doing everything, or by killer class-combination "builds" dreamed up by annoying adolescent boys with nothing better to do with their time and posted on the internet.

WFRP's system is so robust and fun, in fact, that I think it would work perfectly for historical gaming, especially around the period which the Warhammer world is roughly analagous to. I can just imagine a game set in the Italian Wars, or during the Conquest of Mexico, or during the zenith of the Ottoman Empire. The fall of Byzantium, perhaps.